Origin Story
Unclaimed Baggage began back in 1970 with one man and a dream. Doyle Owens borrowed a pickup truck and $300 before striking out for Washington, D.C. with an idea. There, he bought his first load of unclaimed luggage from Trailways Bus Lines and sold the contents back home off of card tables in an old, rented house. In so doing, he birthed an empire. In short order, Owens quit his job selling insurance and threw himself into hawking other people’s abandoned stuff.
At first, Owens, his wife and their two sons processed abandoned luggage for sale on Wednesdays and Saturdays. His first large-scale contract was with Eastern Airlines. As word of this quirky little enterprise grew, Owens cemented connections with all the domestic carriers. Over time, Unclaimed Baggage became the country’s sole purveyor of lost luggage.
In 1981, Owens held his first formal Ski Sale. His inventory of winter sports equipment was stacking up, so he put the word out and cut his prices. Nowadays, on the first Saturday of every November, tiny little Scottsboro is crawling with folks camping out in his parking lot to be first in the door and get their mitts on other people’s cut-rate abandoned ski equipment.
In 1995, Owens’ son and his wife purchased the business, expanding it to cover more than a city block. Along the way, they opened an Unclaimed Baggage museum to showcase the weirdest stuff collected from other folks’ luggage over the decades. The Museum of Found Treasures has become a tourist destination in its own right.
The Museum of Found Treasures includes a suit of Roman legionnaire’s armor, a stuffed rattlesnake, some shrunken human heads, and a life-size audio-animatronic troll from the 1986 David Bowie movie Labyrinth. How anybody could forget and leave a five-foot robotic monster in an airport escapes me, but imagining the stories behind this stuff is half the fun.
Word spread of this quirky place in the middle of nowhere in Alabama, and folks flowed in. Today, Unclaimed Baggage hosts more than a million visitors per year. They process thousands of new items each week that are sorted, cleaned and repurposed for sale both in their store and online. Their inventory is strange beyond description. The really weird bit is that it is simply a reflection of all of us.
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